Kosovo’s Thaci Aspires to Statesmanship, but Guerrilla Past Haunts Him

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“I was fighting on the right side of history, liberating my people from tyranny against a ruthless enemy engaged in a massive attempt at genocide.” PRIME MINISTER HASHIM THACICreditCreditThomasz Lazar for The New York Times

PRISTINA, Kosovo — WHEN Hashim Thaci directed a bloody guerrilla war from the mountains of this poor and rugged country, he was so adept at evading capture that fellow fighters called him the Snake.

Now, Mr. Thaci, 45, the former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army and the current prime minister of Kosovo, wants to be remembered as a statesman. In June he agreed to put in place a landmark power-sharing agreement with Serbia that is being hailed in Europe and the United States as a triumph of peace and reconciliation in the region after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, in which about 120,000 people died, more than 10,000 of them in Kosovo.

Mr. Thaci (pronounced THAH-chee) is being hailed in Washington and Brussels as the Gerry Adams of the Balkans, his country on the road toward Europe, his name even invoked, however improbably, as a possible Nobel Peace Prize candidate.

But in Serbia, he remains a deeply reviled figure, a complication that underlines the challenges to overcoming ethnic enmities in a region where memories run deep. Former K.L.A. commanders and Western diplomats say he was a ruthless and much-feared leader during the 1998-99 Kosovo war, who ordered arrests, assassinations and purges within the rebel army’s ranks to fend off potential rivals. Mr. Thaci has strongly denied this.

“Most people in Serbia consider Thaci to be an unindicted war criminal who personifies the double standard of the victor’s justice,” said Ljiljana Smajlovic, a prominent Serbian commentator who is president of the Serbian Journalists’ Association. “He now wants to forget his past and go by the book, and he is no doubt sincere in that pursuit. But every warlord in the former Yugoslavia reinvents himself as a liberal democrat.”

In an interview, Mr. Thaci rebuffed that characterization, arguing forcefully that he had been fighting a brutal war against a violent enemy. “I was fighting on the right side of history, liberating my people from tyranny against a ruthless enemy engaged in a massive attempt at genocide,” he said.

Yet the past keeps coming back to haunt him. In 2010, a Council of Europe report accused Mr. Thaci of having led a “mafialike” group that smuggled weapons, heroin and human organs during the war and its aftermath. Mr. Thaci has rejected those accusations as well, and the Kosovo government at the time called them “despicable.” In August 2011, the European Union set up a special task force to investigate the veracity of organ-trafficking claims, including whether or not Mr. Thaci was involved. It has not yet delivered its findings.

Asked about the accusations, including that Kosovar Albanians kidnapped Serbs during the war and harvested their kidneys at a secret “yellow house” in Albania, Mr. Thaci transformed his grin into a grimace.

“Something like that never happened; we have nothing to hide,” he said. “The earlier the issue is clear, the better it is for Kosovo. It is really a very heavy burden for us, and we believe in truth and justice.”

Such demons hover over regional reconciliation, and the success of the power-sharing accord would mark a rehabilitation of sorts for Mr. Thaci and a turning point for his country, which has struggled to gain full international acceptance.

MR. THACI said his wartime experience had taught him to keep his patience during six months of 12-hour-a-day talks this year when he faced his former foe, Prime Minister Ivica Dacic of Serbia. Mr. Dacic was the wartime spokesman of the former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, whose forces had tried, without success, to hunt down and kill Mr. Thaci.

“It wasn’t easy to sit opposite one another at the table, two former sworn enemies,” Mr. Thaci said, recalling his first awkward handshake with Mr. Dacic. But he said pragmatism had ultimately prevailed. Being celebrated at home as a former soldier also helped.

An athletic and lanky man with a vise-grip handshake, Mr. Thaci, the seventh of nine children, comes from a family of farmers in the Drenica region of Kosovo, the heartland of Albanian resistance to the Serbs.

He said fighting was in his blood. His paternal grandfather fought the Nazis, and after the war his family became staunch anti-Communists who fought against Serb forces in the Yugoslav Army. Already an activist in his teens, he said, he became politicized while visiting family in Vienna and Paris in the 1980s, and glimpsed the possibility of a “normal” life away from Serbian police batons.

He later went underground to join the Kosovo Liberation Army. While some, like Kosovo’s first president, Ibrahim Rugova, favored Gandhian passive resistance, Mr. Thaci was a forceful advocate of armed struggle. “The Serbian regime would not be pacified by smiles and hugs,” he said.

In the early 1990s, he pursued postgraduate studies in politics and history in Switzerland. He is married and has a son.

He is credited with transforming the unwieldy and divided K.L.A. into a unified fighting machine in the late 1990s, as clashes with Serbian forces intensified. Colleagues recalled how during the war he walked the mountainous border between Kosovo and Albania more than 50 times, wearing a threadbare camouflage uniform and evading Serbian snipers, sometimes through snow several feet deep.

At the NATO-sponsored peace talks in Rambouillet, France, early in 1999, Mr. Thaci made a strong impression on Madeleine K. Albright, the United States secretary of state. He proved to be a pragmatist, signing a compromise deal that fell short of guaranteeing Kosovo’s independence. The talks eventually collapsed when Belgrade refused to withdraw all of its military forces, prompting NATO’s bombing campaign.

AFTER the war, he has been credited with demilitarizing the rebel army, though thousands of Serbs were nevertheless forced to flee from revenge attacks. He founded the Democratic Party of Kosovo, or P.D.K., which was made up largely of former guerrillas. After the party lost two consecutive elections — an unexpected blow — he overhauled its nationalist fighter image, preaching closer ties with the West. He finally won an election in November 2007.

He has also tried to revamp his macho reputation and recently startled even his closest advisers in this conservative country by championing civil rights for gay people. He has developed a love for fine Italian wines, is an avid skier and has long since traded in his camouflage gear for dark designer suits.

Although he has been widely credited with shepherding Kosovo toward independence — Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has called him the “George Washington of Kosovo” — his government has also faced repeated accusations of rampant corruption. In May, he suffered another blow when a European Union court here ordered the arrest of seven former K.L.A. commanders accused of war crimes, including two former close aides.

Mr. Thaci insists that he and his fellow soldiers were freedom fighters. He quoted the lyrics of a favorite Sting song he said he had listened to as a young guerrilla leader.

“Takes more than combat gear to make a man. Takes more than a license for a gun. Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can. A gentleman will walk but never run.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Kosovo’s Leader Aspires to Statesmanship, but Guerrilla Past Haunts Him. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe